How To Become A Freelancer In 2024 💸 The Ultimate Step-by-step Guide To Freelancing For Beginners

[Music] in theory freelancing is a very simple concept you have a skill somebody needs your skill they pay you for the skill that's all but why does it seem so hard to start a freelancing business and you've probably clicked into this video for this very reason you want to either start a freelance business or you have already started a freelance business but you're struggling with all the different kinds of questions that new Freelancers have like how do you price yourself do you need to register a business where do you get clients what do you do to invoice clients do you need contracts stuff like that if you don't know me my name is Dina and I have been full-time self-employed for the past four years and out of these four years a lot of the times I was a freelancer I had a calligraphy and art business where I was offering my calligraphy services to individuals companies I did on-site calligraphy I taught public and corporate calligraphy workshops and I even sold home paintings to Realtors and I'm like not a painter at all I've also dabbled a little bit in social media freelancing right now if you're trying to start a freelance business and you're trying to get into writing or graphic design video editing being a VA being a website designer or an artist or a calligrapher this video will apply to you even though my main freelancing business was my calligraphy and art business because all Freelancers need to have similar things in place you need a way to get clients you need to have a portfolio and invoice your clients and collect payment the first thing you need to do when you're starting a freelance business is get all the business registration legal stuff out of the way so depending on where you are located and how businesses are structured in your country you can start a sole proprietorship or you can start a corporation if you're in the US there is also something called an LLC that you can look into these kinds of business structures are very different and if you have no idea what I'm talking about you need to do some research on this stuff okay and if you're feeling really lost you can ask some business owners in the same area where you live on how they structured their business if you're in Canada like me there's actually a very helpful website that can help you start your sole proprietorship or register your corporation and that is called owner I use owner to register my Corporation and it was such a simple process so you can check it out below if you reside in Canada the next step in starting a freelancing business is to create some kind of portfolio I will say though the majority of people probably need to have a portfolio but if you have a lot of connections or you have big guts you might not even need a portfolio so first of all what is a portfolio a portfolio is basically a place where you are showcasing your work so that your potential clients can see what is it that you do what is the style what are the kinds of designs and they can use this information to decide if they want to work with you probably the most common way to create a portfolio is to have some kind of social media presence and a website I know there are websites like Fiverr and upwork like these are freelancing websites but I actually think those websites are not the greatest if you want to have a really sustainable full-time freelancing business because there are so many people on those kinds of websites charging really really low prices and there's a lot of competition okay you might have a lot of questions at this point about what social media to use how do you actually build a portfolio so I have some specific tips for your portfolio that I'm going to share at the end of this video but I want to give you an overview of the steps you need to take first the next step after you have built some kind of portfolio is to get clients obviously there's a difference between inbound marketing and outbound marketing so you can look at it this way with inbound marketing the customer comes in to you maybe they're finding you through your website or your social media but they're the ones contacting you and asking about your services without bound you are going out to look for these prospects for these customers you are going to networking events you are reaching out to people you are co-emailing people so those are the two types of ways to get clients you can think about how you can get people to come to you that's inbound marketing and how you can go out and find your clients at the start of a freelancing business it's probably less likely you're going to have people come to you directly unless they know what you're doing and you've been doing it for a longer time so the best strategy is to do outbound marketing and do outbound sales you are going out to find your clients with outbound you might feel like it's really scary to email somebody that you don't know and you don't know what to say but it doesn't have to be this way you can totally learn how to send really a effective emails a couple years ago when I started to sell paintings and do on-site calligraphy and corporate calligraphy workshops it was really scary for me to contact people I did a ton of research and actually I remember coming across one of hubspot's blog posts that came with some email templates so I found them for you and in my video description I have a link to 25 proven sales email templates one of them that I've used a ton in my business is the cold email template that starts off with some recent information that you saw about them so you can see this email starts off with recently I noticed that you company accomplishment congratulations and this works because it shows that you're paying attention to the prospect a really good way you can apply this to Instagram is actually replying to somebody's Instagram stories so it doesn't seem so salesy and like you planned the whole thing it just feels more organic that something prompted you to reach out another one I love is this one where you send a really short email asking to talk to the right person it doesn't come off as too salesy and it's really easy for the other person to deal with you and I have used this a ton of course with these templates you should change the tone depending on how you act actually sound in email or DMS but just reading through these templates and explanations of why certain things work in certain emails is going to help you a lot so check them out below and thank you to HubSpot for always looking out for us and providing us with these free resources other than cold emailing and cool dming people another really great way you can do outbound sales and outbound marketing is actually to go to networking events networking is probably the method that I would say has worked the best for me but it is a long-term strategy you are not going to get results right away because you really need to build these connections with people and then you meet their 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